The King is dead, long live the King

Being on the eve of National Customer Service Week (5-9 October) it feels like a reasonable time to reflect on how our service stacks up and how we measure whether we’re getting it right.

On 13 June last year, I was in Berlin when I heard that Bought By Many had been crowned the Most Trusted Pet Insurance Provider by Moneywise. I was shocked but delighted. We’d only been in the pet insurance market for a little over two years and the award was voted for by thousands of real people, rather than the industry insiders who decide other awards. A serious endorsement for the customer-centric principles that underly everything we do. It was the king of the many awards we’d received up to that point.

Fast forward to June 2020 and the sad news came that Moneywise had become one of the casualties of the pandemic and folded. The implication was that the Moneywise ‘Most Trusted’ prize would not be awarded again. The king had died.

How we validate our service

Our response? To up our game further – as always. We constantly get feedback from our customers on how we’re doing and keep a close eye on our Net Promoter Score, but we also wanted a deeper, external validation of how well we’re serving pet owners.

We have had huge regard for The Institute of Customer Services (ICS), which is running National Customer Service Week, for some time. It’s an independent body that assesses customer satisfaction across multiple industries and creates standardised measures to compare businesses across the UK.

We’re currently too small to be included in the public UK Customer Satisfaction Index (UKCSI) – so instead, we asked ICS to run a separate survey of our customers using the same assessment criteria to the UKCSI, to provide us with a robust comparator for Bought By Many against the public Index.

When they told us our score, I was amazed. We’d scored 90.1 overall, putting us in the top 5% of all UK companies for customer satisfaction and above every company in the public July 2020 UKCSI - including Amazon, John Lewis and Nationwide. We scored highest in the UK for ease – meaning customers have an exceptional experience with us buying cover and making claims.

Interestingly, each and every one of our benchmark scores (the underlying elements of the overall Index) beat the top businesses in the public July Index: meaning that in addition to ease, we had the highest score in that published Index for trust, loyalty and quality.

Looking just at insurance in that Index, the next highest insurance provider scored 83.3 and the only other pure pet insurance business on the list scored 79.3. We weren't just better, we were better by a long way.

Celebrating the people that make it happen

Clearly, our score is a testament to our crew who dedicate huge effort to building quality policies that meet the needs of pets and are loved by people, and our growing customer service team who help thousands of people to both navigate insurance and to use the cover it provides every week.

It’s these colleagues we will be celebrating internally and externally during National Customer Service Week.

You might have seen we also ranked in the top 30 of the Sunday Times Tech Track this year and our customer service focus helps explain our rapid growth. Loyal customers have a higher lifetime value: as customers stay customers for longer and more recommendations means lower cost of acquisition. Quality products that are a joy to use are, of course, good for business, but they’re even better for the pet owners who choose our cover.

As National Customer Service Week starts, it is great that we can celebrate setting a new, validated, gold standard for customer service. Long live the King.